Welcome to Property Week, a week-long UrbanTurf series devoted to intriguing residential properties ranging from a DC version of Wrigleyville to a warehouse-turned-loft in Brooklyn. Enjoy.

A rendering of 1219. Courtesy of Ditto Residential

The Oslo opened in Shaw two years ago with a mix of units that included solely three- and four-bedroom apartments, a stark departure from the normal unit mix for new apartment buildings in the area. The layout for each unit at The Oslo was also a little different — a large communal living and kitchen area surrounded by en-suite bedrooms, a harbinger for the larger co-living developments that have sprung up in the area since.

Now, Oslo developer Ditto Residential is doubling down with a Northeast DC project that will be comprised entirely of five-bedroom apartments.

Located at 1219 Florida Avenue NE (map), the four-story building will have eight apartments, each with five bedrooms.

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“It’s a shared housing experience where people basically get to create community and have a culture outside of [the] stale community room that is in most apartment complexes,” explains Ditto Residential president Martin Ditto.

The layout for each apartment arranges the doors to the various bedrooms around a large common kitchen/living room/dining area, without unnecessary hallways or wasted space. While it might be tempting to liken the set-up to a dormitory, the bedrooms themselves are more comparable in size to those inside traditional apartments, with a closet occupying one wall of the bedroom. Each bedroom also comes with its own bathroom. Rents will range from $1,100-1,200 per person a month.

During the conceptual planning of the building, the Ditto team decided that they were comfortable with only five-bedroom apartments in order to preserve the smaller community feel, and it just so happened that the footprint of the building was compatible with that unit style.

Sizeable demand for these sorts of projects means that 1219 Florida Avenue NE is one of four co-living concepts that Ditto has in the pipeline. The building, designed by Square 134, is scheduled for delivery in late summer or early fall of this year.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/only_five_bedrooms_a_new_trinidad_apartment_building_bets_on_sharing/11314

3 Comments

SalMcGee said at 5:45 pm on Tuesday June 14, 2016:

How can you write this story without talking about zoning? This is zoned R-4. So how are they getting around the new (ridiculous) IZ requirements for 3 IZ units in an 8-unit building? How do these plans differ from what Ditto would have done before the downzoning?

I have a hard time believing this is what Ditto wants and is really the only thing they could conceivably get by the Zoning Administrator and avoiding the BZA.

Makeba-The-Architect said at 6:23 pm on Tuesday June 14, 2016:

I can get behind 2-4 bedrooms, but 5 is getting greedy. 2-3 people in the unit will have a similar schedule…& I assume 1 kitchen? mmmm ok. Hopefully all will have private baths like the Oslo. Time will tell.

AD said at 9:20 pm on Wednesday June 15, 2016:

This is not Trinidad, it’s close but Trinidad starts across the street.